


Breach

by theficisalie



Series: Desert Heat [7]
Category: Bandom, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), My Chemical Romance
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-20
Updated: 2012-03-20
Packaged: 2017-11-02 05:53:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/365655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theficisalie/pseuds/theficisalie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gerard's mouth is caked with dust when he wakes up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breach

**Author's Note:**

> beta: [restlesslikeme](http://restlesslikeme.livejournal.com)

There was blood all over the floor, slick puddles of red on white, grinning up at Gerard like the gleam in a serial killer’s eye. He was on his hands and knees in the substance, leaving backwards duplicates of his fingerprints on the paper-like floor.

Gerard’s stomach rippled with the motion of the floor until he was falling into his own eyes, down a long, black shaft at the end of which was blinding red. He screamed, and tried to cover his eyes, but his hands wouldn’t move from where they were stuck behind him.

He landed. Face-first in a soft pile that made his knees ache and his face burn.

The floor was dark and moving, a collection of ancient photographs jittering inside their square, white frames. Red dripped onto one, from the tip of his nose to the copy of a windshield with moving terrain.

Gerard wiped his nose on his sleeve and reached for the photograph. The edges were razors, cutting into his fingers. He dropped it, and found himself following the photograph down into the endless piles of Mikey’s smiling face, Jet Star’s helmet, Fun Ghoul’s twitches.

_“Tell me everything you know.”_

Gerard blinked against the white light. “What? I don’t know what you mean,” he mumbled. Where was he? An empty white space? That didn’t make any sense. How could there be blood on the floor if he wasn’t bleeding? Where were the photographs? He wasn’t, there couldn’t, he was...

He was in the Trans AM with its painted sides of freedom, probably. Yes, that sounded right. Driving away from a pile of dead Dracs, bleeding white mingling with the dust of the desert.

Gerard blinked at his hands, tightened their grip on the steering wheel. He couldn’t help looking in the rear-view mirror at the small man in the backseat, a wheezing, bright and living person who’d just popped out of the cement of the City like a flower. The man was almost smiling at the gun in his lap, a clean white.

 _A new slate_ , Gerard thought. That’s what the guns and the desert were, they were a chance to start anew. A chance for redemption.

He took in a breath, wondering what he should say now that the man had endured a trial by ray guns, wondering if he should say anything at all until they were back in the diner. The man made up his mind for him when Gerard saw the shadow of realization flicker over his face. He moved almost the second before the thought had clicked into place, pressing the gun up to Kobra’s face. Instinct. Observation.

Gerard looked over: Jet Star was frozen in the back, too afraid to lose a member of his family. He’d been different since they’d picked up the man, there was something else holding him upright now. Something better. But Gerard didn’t have time for that. He looked into his brother’s eyes, saw what he needed in the glittering depths, and looked back at the man.

He had the gall to be just a _little_ bit smug, even if anyone with any sanity could see that he was having trouble breathing. Gerard saw red for a second, and decided. He slammed his foot down on the brakes, taking them all by surprise. The only one of them that didn’t have a seatbelt was suddenly shoved forward into the back of Gerard’s seat.

Gerard grimaced, and the second he’d shoved the car into park, he twisted in his seat and punched the man in his already-broken nose. The man started and _coughed_. Gerard barely had enough time to close his eyes, and when he opened them, the man was out of the car, heaving from the depths of his lungs onto the boiling ground below.

Gerard wiped his eyes, blinking at the red that came off his face. “He’s...” he said, frowning at the way he couldn’t quite hear. There was something in his ears, making everything fuzzy at the edges. Jet Star flickered out of sight, and Gerard frowned. Mikey was already rushing out of the car, one of his custom-made medkits in hand. There were more important things than wondering why the car didn’t feel real. Because if the man was coughing up blood, that meant that there was blood in his lungs.

“Fuck,” he growled, coming out of the car as his brother turned the tiny man over onto his back. He ripped open the jacket, and deftly cut the man’s shirt in two. Bile rose to the back of Gerard’s throat as he saw the shape of the man’s side. “Broken ribs?” he asked, jaw clenching to keep his stomach under control.

Mikey twisted his mouth in concentration. “Yeah,” he muttered, wiping something yellow over the entire area.

The man’s back arched for a second, a last convulsion before he collapsed, unconscious, on the ground.

“Hold him down,” Kobra muttered again, scalpel in already-gloved hands.

Gerard nodded, trying not to talk. This probably wasn’t the most helpful time for him to be throwing up. He gripped the man’s shoulders, careful to stay out of the light. If he’d kept his eyes open, he definitely would have thrown up, but as it was, the sounds of knife cutting through flesh were enough to make him gag.

“Just hold your breath,” Mikey said, from beneath his yellow helmet. No. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, his hair was falling forward, the blonde strands swaying as he cut past muscles and tissues, avoiding vessels that he knew were there. If Gerard knew anything about broken ribs, which he didn’t, it was that they had to be fixed. “It’s less gross if you look, honestly.”

“It isn’t,” Gerard said, but he looked anyway. He couldn’t help himself: how often did you get to see the inside of a man’s chest?

“I need you to hold this,” Kobra muttered. Mikey muttered. Kobra pointed. “Right here. Can you do that? I haven’t hit any arteries, but just in case...anything, just hold it. Talk to me, Party, come on. Talk to me.”

Gerard nodded, taking the gauze and pressing it over the lump of yellowish red. The bone was white and gleaming. “I’m going to throw up,” he said.

“What else?” Kobra muttered, keeping his cool with a tube of BoneGlu in his mouth and his hands covered in red. The red from the floor? He reached his hand in and his eyes twitched. Something wrong. He was very conservative about his facial motions. Everything meant something. “It punctured his rib, shit.”

“Sew it up!” Gerard said. “Here, give me that.” He grabbed the tube, and held it in the hand that didn’t have the gauze. “I can’t believe you used to do this all day. Don’t all the floaty bits make you sick? They make me sick. Floating around like soup. I’m not going to be able to eat soup again, fuck.”

Kobra threaded a needle and leaned in as closely as he could. “No. It’s like the inside of a machine, only it runs itself, fixes itself if it can. I love doing this.” He sniffed. Mikey’s eyes glinted, narrowed in concentration. Somehow knowing that he had to keep Gerard talking even as he put his entire mind into the surgery. “You were always too empathetic for your own good. Remember your first Drac?”

“Yeah,” Gerard said.

“Tell me about it.”

“I killed it. Thriller said there wasn’t anything inside it. And I did it. Dead and empty just like when it was alive.”

“Remember how you wouldn’t come out of your room for a whole day after that?”

Gerard chuckled. “Yeah. Cobra brought me a drink. Said it had electrolytes in it or something.”

“Glue,” Kobra said, hand twitching. Gerard put it in, grimacing at the blood that brushed over his knuckles when Mikey’s hand touched his. He didn’t even know this little man and he was already getting blood all over him. And the floor. But the floor was the desert, and it was brown. “Did that help?”

Gerard nodded, wiped his forehead on his shoulder, blinking hard against the twist in his mind. “Yes. It was probably just water, but I felt like shit, and I guess I believed him.”

“Take off the gauze now,” Kobra said. “And get those bandages ready. I should fix his nose while we’re here, too.” Mikey sighed, almost happily. In his element. He would have made a great surgeon, doctor, helicopter. “I like how you can just put a person back together, and if they’re strong enough, they’ll make it.”

Gerard had the bandages in his hands, and started wrapping them around the man’s midsection the second Mikey finished stitching the wound closed. He stopped, once there were a few layers and he could no longer see blood seeping through. They were nice and tight, just like Kobra had taught him. “He’ll make it,” he said.

Kobra frowned, doing something disgusting to the man’s nose so he could glue it back into place. Peeling back the skin like his face was a grape. “How do you know?”

“I just do,” Gerard said, shrugging. How could he put into words the feeling that tugged at his gut every time he looked at the swollen eyes and shaggy hair? “You can see it in his eyes. He ran with a broken rib, shot with one...he doesn’t want to die. That’s how I know he’s going to live.”

“Well, he won’t if we leave him out in the desert,” Mikey said. “Jet? Help us pick him up?”

Jet was gone. But he was there, arms reaching for the broken man. Gerard couldn’t resist tracing his finger over the edge of a tattoo he could see peeking out from beneath the bandage. It had been some kind of a bird, a swallow maybe. Stark ink against taught skin.

Beautiful.

_“No, no, no. Tell me about the Killjoys.”_

Gerard frowned, and blinked. There wasn’t any blood on his hands or his face. The light was gone from the sky, because the sky was a ceiling. The ceiling was covered in photographs. One fell down, hit him on the head and swallowed him up, white frame dissecting the world until something jostled his shoulder.

Gerard started, head twitching to the side. It was just Ghoul, on his way to grab some food. In the middle of the night.

Ghoul looked at him, a frown on his face. Gerard frowned back. Ghoul’s eyes narrowed, and he slowly reached for a can of Power Pup like he thought he might get reprimanded. He always seemed like that, skittish like a dog that had been kicked in the side too many times and wouldn’t trust humans anymore.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asked, stabbing the can without taking his eyes off Gerard.

Gerard blinked. “Nothing,” he said.

Ghoul angled his head towards the can but kept watching Gerard even as he reached for a spoon and removed the knife. He was extremely observant, Gerard had noticed that from the moment they’d met, in the alley. Ghoul was always thinking, mapping out exits and escape routes, always watching and cataloguing information in that head of his. He’d probably memorized the layouts of all of their safehouses, because whenever Gerard couldn’t sleep, he could always see Ghoul slipping around, sticking to places where shadows would be during the day even in the black of night. The man never tripped over things, or bumped into tables, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he could reach for the cutlery without looking.

But he never failed to surprise Gerard.

“Stop looking at me,” Ghoul mumbled. “You’re freaking me out.”

“Sorry,” Gerard said.

Ghoul’s eyes twitched to the side, and then he pulled the can of food close to his chest. Like Gerard was going to take it from him. His inked fingers curled possessively around the tin. “Seriously, stop,” Ghoul said.

Gerard blinked, and looked to the side, at the blinding light of the sun. When he glanced back, Ghoul was gone. Tucked away in the shadows of the building, most likely, eating like it was his last meal.

It wasn’t. Or was it? Gerard’s stomach growled, and the world spun.

_“I don’t care about fucking Fun Ghoul, Party. Tell me what I want to know.”_

“Hello?” Gerard frowned at the white expanse of air. “Who’s saying that?”

Fun Ghoul.

He wasn’t in all of the photographs that were bleeding at the edges, being rained on by Gerard’s dripping body. But he was in a lot, Gerard could see closeups of the curve of his nose, the length of his eyelashes, the sparkle in his eyes when he laughed with his entire body.

He was in the diner again with a twist of his head. Daylight streamed in through a window. But this wasn’t where he was supposed to be. It wasn’t where he was. Or...it was early morning, by the angle of the sun. Early morning sunrise even though there was no sun.

Gerard’s feet picked themselves up and moved him down the hall, out the door. He couldn’t have stopped even if he’d wanted to, traveling into the breezily cool air of the start of day. Sunrise was happening, a glorious strip of red staining the dark blue of the night.

Morning in the desert was breathtaking still. Even after years of seeing the sun rise and set over the mottledly flat land, Gerard found himself staring with awe at the beauty that the world created on its own, free of corporations and photographs, moving and changing and being. Something made Gerard stop when he turned to follow the light around the side of the building where they held their shooting practices. He didn’t completely round the corner, just peeked his head out and watched.

Ghoul was already up, hair wet and clean, sitting on a small table and watching the line of the horizon. He was so small, and in this light, seemed almost fragile to Gerard. His legs were dangling free over the edge of the table, his arms thin without the vest or long-sleeved shirt he usually wore.

He was far from fragile. Gerard knew there were scars on his feet and under his ribs, and probably in a thousand other places. He was a collection of scars, knitted together with tattoos and skin.

With his hair tucked behind his ear, Gerard could see the peace on Ghoul’s face as he stared at the sun. He took in a deep breath and let it out as a sigh, his shoulders following the motion. He was comfortable out here, calm without the threat of other people around. It’s what made Gerard’s hands twitch on the side of the diner and his heart ache, and what stopped him from going to sit beside Ghoul. They couldn’t share this moment because for some reason, Ghoul couldn’t trust him, or any of them.

Gerard could imagine the sun reflecting in his open, green eyes, so guarded because Ghoul _wanted_ to be honest and free, to share. It was in the way his body twitched to help, was always moving, in the way he looked out for Grace and Gerard, treated them all the same and different.

But he couldn’t be the one to tuck Ghoul’s hair behind his ear. Ghoul wouldn’t let him in.

_“Fuck it, he’s useless like this. Wake him up.”_

“I’m not sleeping,” Gerard snapped, looking around for the source of the noise. Suddenly, his head hurt, and his eyes squeezed together. He was tied to a chair, and couldn’t feel his hands. Something snipped, and his arms fell limply to his sides, dead at the ends.

Korse loomed above him, his head white against the dark of the ceiling. The sun was setting outside. White hands reached down to grab his face, and Gerard moved his hands instinctively to pry them away, even though he couldn’t feel the tips of his fingers.

“Give me what I want,” Korse growled. “I _know_ you have the information I need.”

Gerard’s eyes widened as the hands squeezed his aching skull. “I don’t know what you need!” He could see a Scarecrow in the corner, tapping the end of a needle, preparing him for another round, another turn of the empty stomach.

“I need your precious little Killjoys,” Korse snapped. “I’ll even trade you information for your cooperation, Party Poison. Let’s start with your brother, shall we? Kobra Kid, the one with the blonde hair and the angry eyes. What’s his name? I heard you muttering things, starts with an M? My...Michael? Is that it?”

“I can’t,” Gerard said.

“You can, and you _will_.”

Gerard’s eyes filled with tears. “You’re hurting me,” he said, voice hoarse and quiet.

“I’ll stop if you tell me about Kobra Kid. About Michael.”

“Your information doesn’t interest me!” Gerard shouted. “I don’t care what you have to say!”

“You tell me about Kobra Kid,” Korse said, eyes maniacal. “If you do, I’ll tell you all about Frank.”

Gerard sniffed, nose wrinkling. “I don’t know who that is.”

“Frank Iero,” Korse snapped. “Oh, right, fuck. I forgot that you give each other nicknames. How _cute_. Frank. Frank Iero. The one you call... _Fun Ghoul_.”

A Scarecrow gargled something. Gerard’s mouth dropped open as Korse screamed. “I need more time!” he shouted. “Can’t you imbeciles hold those fucking vermin at bay?” He dropped Gerard onto the floor where his legs were just dead weight beneath him. “Don’t think this is over, Killjoy. I’ll be back for you and your little friends before you can smash your next pill. If you don’t want me to catch you, I’d suggest that you keep running.”

He laughed, a horrible grating screech of a noise, and then there was silence.

Gerard’s arms gave out beneath him, tingling and stabbing like the pain behind his eyes. Everything was too bright even though it was dark, and it felt like someone had wedged a sledgehammer into his brain. He twitched his toes but nothing moved in his boots. He lay, bruised and confused on the broken floor of the cabin. As lights flashed in the distance, his eyes drooped shut, closed tight against the pain gripping at his heart, clawing up his throat, the deep burn of betrayal scarring his chest.

He couldn’t run, even if he wanted to.


End file.
